A Stiff Awakening
by MudbludGranger
Summary: The Doctor may not be human, but he's still a man.


I wasn't exactly sure of why I was walking around the TARDIS.

Alright, I knew enough to know I was bored and I could admit that I was – hard as if was to say – lonely. I was having all of these thoughts … I knew it was a bad idea to wear the outfit I'd worn in my Pond days while I was washing my new waistcoat and purple jacket look. It filled my head with all sorts of memories, Amy and Rory playing darts in the console room while music played, the sound of life and laughter–

_Stop right there_, I told myself. _Those days are over, Raggedy Man._

I winced outwardly as I called myself that. I hadn't heard the words spoken aloud since … it happened. And I'd been careful not to think them. I'm unsure of why it was all coming back to me today, but then I remembered the date. September twenty ninth. That's the date they …

'Doctor?'

Aha! Distraction! Exactly what I needed.

'Clara!' I said, beaming, spinning around towards her open bedroom door. So, she'd found it last night, then. Good. I'd head a few stern words with the TARDIS – I was getting tired of finding Clara curled up in random places. The couch in the library, the laundry basket, the bunkbed room, the wardrobe atop a pile of clothes.

'You okay?' she asked me. I'd probably let a reaction to my thoughts flicker on my face.

''Course I'm okay,' I told her, straightening my bowtie (red, better suited to the old outfit) and leaning against her door frame. 'Why wouldn't I be?'

'You look …' Clara paused, biting her lip, 'lost. You look lost.'

'Lost?' I asked her, putting my thumbs in my pockets and straightening up. I shook my head. 'That's ridiculous. Lost? Me? Never.'

'Well–'

I saw the smirk on her face and I knew she was about to recount our last adventure on a planet called Beauxtamore. There was a village called Snow. Lovely place, lovely people, lots of snow. There was a big castle on a hill the villagers called "Crack Castle" and they seemed to be pretty afraid of it. I spoke to an old woman who told me "two young people" had visited it a few days previously, and the crack inside ('glowing blue, shaped like a wonky seventy seven,' she'd described) had closed up. Not a day later, four new planets had appeared in the sky. Oh, I knew what that was, of course. I'd read the books. I'd heard it was all based on a true story. I'd _visited _those planets that appeared. All very nice, although the people on Slyth Etrude were quite … not exactly friendly. Their fields were riddled with snakes. The sky was green. It reminded me or toxic gas I'd encountered in World War Two.

Yes, but anyway, we'd gotten lost on that planet. Clara wanted to see a mass graveyard (I've no idea why, morbid, that girl is, but I couldn't refuse) and we knew it wasn't far, so we decided to walk. We ended up in a "haunted" village called July. Why would you call a village _July_? July is a month. July should stay a month. July is not a village. Maybe it was named after someone called Julie, or something.

'Well, nothing,' I cut across Clara, finger in the air. If we'd been closer together, I'd have placed it on her lips. 'I knew exactly where I was going. I just wanted to stop off for some … er … water,' I said. She rolled her eyes. I ignored that.

I stayed in the doorway and she watched me. She did that a lot. Well, I caught her doing that a lot. Or maybe she caught _me _watching _her_. Either way, it doesn't matter. We weren't talking, but she wasn't continuing what she'd been doing, either. I could tell she'd been painting her toenails (why do women _do _that?) and that threw me a bit, because she didn't seem like the type. But the evidence was there; she had the strange foamy things on her toes, and the brush in hand. The bottle was resting on a hardback book by her knee as she sat cross-legged on her bed. I saw the book and remembered she was reading it for the third time. She said she found the villain interesting. He was a Victorian Doctor who tried to take over the world and then died. I couldn't see why.

'Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to move?' Clara asked, after what I assumed was several minutes. I blinked, and nodded.

'Right, yes, sorry,' I stuttered, and slowly turned to leave her be. 'I'll be off, then.'

'I didn't mean that,' she said quickly. 'I _meant_: Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to actually _come in_?'

'Oh, right, of course,' I said.

I cleared my throat just for something to do, and walked over the threshold of her room. My arms were hanging stupidly, stiffly at my sides and I realized why I held them that way. I'd never been in Clara's room before. Well, not while she was in it. And never so late at night. It was what – ten? Eleven? Who knew? But we'd spent the day on a planet with a close enough system of time to Earth's, and we were still pretty much counting time off of that. It was night for us, anyway. Bed time. Well, bed time for the human. I didn't plan on sleeping any time soon. There was no _time _for that. I was meeting Albert – good old Albert Einstein, that is – later on. Then, because Clara constantly insisted I "get with the times", she'd convinced me to go out for _pizza _with _Jennifer Lawrence. Pizza_. Honestly! That's not excited at _all_!

I sat down on the edge of Clara's bed. She closed her nail varnish bottle and put it on her bedside table, then put her book beside it, on top of another book she'd just finished. The last in that series. It was an endless cycle. She'd read the last book, see the first and go 'oh, haven't read this in a while' and read the whole series again. Seventeen books. Sometimes she'd read the novella, too, and the spinoffs. Some of those spinoffs were weird. One was about an ex-time travelling alien who settled down, got a job as a detective, got a roommate, got some friends, went around solving crimes, vanished for three years in twenty fifteen and came back in twenty eighteen complaining that series four of his favourite television show still wasn't out, but his favourite actor and actress had come back to another show he liked. Then there was something about some woman called Amanda Masen, something about her name not being Amanda, a think about a guy called Chaikolok, a bad guy murdering someone, then the detective got a job in a museum, changed his name to Tom, abandoned his old life and spent his time painting pictures when he wasn't working. And _then _he quit and became a government official, calling himself Paul, pretending to be the detective's bother, the detective being _himself _but in the past. And let's not even _go there _about what happens after Paul, when he becomes _Alfie_. The guy really needs to make up his mind.

'Do you think they're dry?' Clara asked, nodding towards he toes. I shrugged.

'I wouldn't know,' I told her, and she shrugged too.

She pulled off the foam thing and wriggled her toes. Then she stretched, climbed off her bed, and walked to sit next to me. I grinned at her, but she didn't grin back.

'Do you ever get bored?' she asked. 'I mean, bored of just … going off to some new planet every day, then spending your nights all alone, then repeating. Do you ever get lonely, like when I'm not around?'

I shrugged.

'Where's this coming from?' I asked. She shrugged, too.

'I guess it's because _I _do,' she told me, her small shoulders slumping forward slightly. She was so small. Once, I'd commented on her short height, and she'd said, 'I'm not short, I'm fun sized.' I said, 'wouldn't you be more fun if you were bigger?'

… Never have I been hit that hard, in that many places, that quickly. Lesson learned: don't make fun of small people. Well, not that I was making fun of her. I was _joking. _But Clara's bossy, and bossy people are not to be messed with, because they can get aggressive.

'Why would you get lonely?' I asked her. 'You've got your dad, you've got your family, you've got Angie and Artie,' I listed. 'Oh, and me,' I added, as an afterthought.

'That's sort of the problem,' Clara said. I frowned. 'I've got _you_, but not _all the time_.'

'I don't think I quite understand what you–'

What happened next was completely unexpected, and very familiar.

Once upon a time, a million years ago, I'd stood in Amelia Pond's bedroom as she threw herself at me in that very human act of kissing and seduction. Then, I'd practically flew away from her. She was getting married in the morning. We were friends. She shouldn't be doing _that_. But now, less than a millionth of a _second _ago, Clara had flung herself at me and kissed me, too. But not the way Amy had. Clara was gentler, and softer, softer than even herself.

_Not herself_, I had to sharply remind myself. _That Victorian Governess was not Clara. She was an __**echo **__of Clara._

Clara pulled back, her cheeks pink, and she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

'Sorry,' she said.

'For what?' I managed to ask, wishing my eyes would stop being as wide as they were.

'About _this_,' said Clara, sounding breathless, and then she was on me again.

Clara's second kiss was less gentle. Somehow she'd climbed on into my lap from sitting next to me, and I couldn't understand why I wasn't throwing her off. My natural reaction to being unexpectedly kissed by a friend or a companion was to flail about and run away. And I did the _opposite _of that. I kissed her _back_. (Well, I kissed her _mouth_, I reminded myself, thinking of what I'd said to Rory about kissing Amy all that time ago, but that thought barely registered now.)

Clara been small, but she was strong. She clambered off of me and back onto her bed, and pulled me down by the collar so that I was hovering over her. I threw my hands out to stop myself landing directly on top of her, so I could lower myself more gently down. _Why was I still doing this_?

_You may not be human, but you're still a man_, a voice at the back of my head informed me.

_Shut up_, the main part of my mind advised the voice.

But the smaller voice won.

Clara's hands were at my neck, behind my head, her fingers digging through my hair, and mine were either side of her head on her pillow as I held myself up and leaned down so we were still connected at the lips. She reached and grabbed one of my hands and shoved it up her shirt and held it on top of her right breast. She controlled my hand, willing it to do what she wanted it to do, and when she was done with that she forced it down her stomach, down, down, and then up again. Right up her skirt. I think she thought I needed encouraging. I probably did.

It was about here I stopped being rational and let desires I'd label as "human desires" take over. Only I wasn't human.

_Close enough_, the small voice said.

Clara pulled herself upward, pressing her chest against mine though we were both fully clothed. My hand was still up her skirt, and without herself it found its way up through the leg of her knickers, and I brushed my thumb over her area. She shivered, and her mouth fell open, breaking the kiss I thought was never ending. I took the opportunity to press my lips to the corner of her mouth, then her throat, then she grabbed it and forced it down to join my hand. I yanked her knickers down with one hand and didn't bother to see how far they came down, as I did what she clearly wanted me to do.

Clara's nails dug into my scalp and tugged at my hair so hard I felt it would rip out of the roots. She was barely making any noise, but she sounded like a person who was in horrible pain, fighting back a scream. But I knew it wasn't pain. It was pleasure, and I was causing it. That was something I hadn't done in a very long time. But someone so experienced as I am is never out of practise.

Eventually I replaced my tongue with my fingers, going slowly at first, as my mouth worked my way up to her chest, caressing the exposed skin above the low cut of her tight t-shirt. She forced herself up, so we were both on hour knees, facing each other, my fingers still working furiously, and without even undoing my braces she plunged her hand down my pants.

Then it all went wrong.

The image started to go blurry and the sounds were echoing and wrong. Clara's cries of 'Doctor' were no longer cries, but harsh whispers, and I felt a hand on my shoulder where there was no hand. At least not in this world, the world I was trying hard to hold on to–

'_Doctor_!' Clara hissed. I awoke with a jolt.

We were on a couch in a living room of sorts in the TARDIS and it appeared we had fallen asleep, sitting side by side. I turned my eyes on Clara and noticed her face was that of someone who had just woken up after a long sleep. Her eyelashes were matted with sleep and sticking together, and her hair was tousled, hanging by her face.

'We fell asleep,' she said, stating the obvious. She stood up and stretched, her t-shirt – the same one she was wearing in the dream – rising up a few inches and exposing some bare stomach. She smoothed it out as she let her hands fall to her sides. 'I slept well.'

'Did you?' I asked, my eyebrows raising. I did not feel as though I had been asleep. I felt like I'd been sitting for hours, bored.

'Yeah,' she said, now stretching her back and making small noises of pleasure. 'I'm all stiff.'

I sat forward, and I knew what she meant.

'Me too,' I agreed.

'Clearly,' she said. 'Down, boy.'

Not the "down boy" treatment again. I was about to roll my eyes, but then I realized what she'd meant. Oh. _Oh. That _hadn't happened in a while.

'I'm going to find breakfast,' Clara said, shaking back her hair and tying it loosely with a band she had around her wrist. 'Come find me when you've stretched out.'

She patted my head as she left. I wanted to say "I'm not a dog", responding to the way she'd patted it, and I frowned, watching her go. I sighed. Why was I suddenly so … _disappointed_.

_Because you wanted it to be real_, the small voice said at the back of my head.

_Shut up_, I advised it again.

_You know, that's the first sign of madness_, said the voice. _Talking to yourself._

'I'm not talking to myself,' I mumbled out loud, then caught myself. 'Okay, maybe I am. So what?' I grumbled, then slouched off after Clara to see where she went.

The voice continued to laugh at me, long after I'd stopped listening to it.


End file.
